Abriael_GN
RSI Employee of the Year
Now that the NDA on Microsoft Flight Simulator is gone, here's something people playing on mid-range graphics cards (I'd say GTX 1660 ti and lower, but you probably better check even if you have better) may want to keep an eye on.
The menus of the game feature a fully-rendered and animated scene behind the options which is VERY performance-intensive.
Since V-sync settings don’t apply to menus, it all runs with unlocked framerate and on non-top-of-the-line GPUs utilization is stuck at 100% while idle all the time, even with the window not in focus. This means heat, unnecessary part wear & tear, and even crashes in menus with no error messages if your card is really struggling. Funnily, the world map which is the only thing that really needs to be animated is the only screen that has lower utilization (40% for me).
Until Asobo solves this, here's a stopgap workaround that can help a lot. You can go in your video card control panel (I only have visibility on Nvidia's but I'm sure there has to be a similar option on AMD) and force limit framerate to 60. This drops utilization from 100% to 70% for me, which still isn't ideal but helps a ton to keep things under control.
If you want to create a profile for the game to do it automatically, on the nvidia control panel you can go to program settings and select Microsoft Flight Simulator (if you have the Windows 10 version it won't detect it automatically so you can uncheck "Show only programs found on this computer" and select it from the list of all supported games instead).
Hope it helps. Nowadays GPUs have plenty of failsafes in place, so this won't likely cook your video card, but it's still good practice to avoid unnecessary wear and tear, and if you're crashing, that gets annoying.
The menus of the game feature a fully-rendered and animated scene behind the options which is VERY performance-intensive.
Since V-sync settings don’t apply to menus, it all runs with unlocked framerate and on non-top-of-the-line GPUs utilization is stuck at 100% while idle all the time, even with the window not in focus. This means heat, unnecessary part wear & tear, and even crashes in menus with no error messages if your card is really struggling. Funnily, the world map which is the only thing that really needs to be animated is the only screen that has lower utilization (40% for me).
Until Asobo solves this, here's a stopgap workaround that can help a lot. You can go in your video card control panel (I only have visibility on Nvidia's but I'm sure there has to be a similar option on AMD) and force limit framerate to 60. This drops utilization from 100% to 70% for me, which still isn't ideal but helps a ton to keep things under control.
If you want to create a profile for the game to do it automatically, on the nvidia control panel you can go to program settings and select Microsoft Flight Simulator (if you have the Windows 10 version it won't detect it automatically so you can uncheck "Show only programs found on this computer" and select it from the list of all supported games instead).
Hope it helps. Nowadays GPUs have plenty of failsafes in place, so this won't likely cook your video card, but it's still good practice to avoid unnecessary wear and tear, and if you're crashing, that gets annoying.
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